The New York Times is reporting that Google is “quietly lobbying” for proposed legislation in the great state of Nevada to legalize self-driving cars on public roads.

Back in the fall of 2010, Google announced that they were in fact developing the technology for automated driving, and that they had already been testing the cars with great results.  Google said that they has test-driven the robotic overlords self-driving cars more than 140,000 miles in California, 1,000 of those being driven entirely autonomously.

A couple months ago we got some video of the cars in action, signalling that the future is upon us.  Slow down! You’re driving like a maniac, bot!

According to the NYT, Google hired a Las Vegas-based lobbyist to promote the legislation in Nevada.  One piece of legislation allows the licensing and operation of the autonomous cars and another would allow texting behind the wheel of a self-driving car.  You know some lawmaker’s daughter in Nevada made them put that one in there.

The self-driving cars could have great benefits, like safety, fuel efficiency and job creation.  Unfortunately, they could also aid in the transportation of our robot masters during the robot uprising.

But lower gas costs sound nice.

No word on why Google is looking to Nevada to break this issue.  There is also no word on whether inebriated gamblers leaving casinos could get behind the wheel of an automated car.  I see no correlation.

Google says the white paper states that the Google Search Appliance "does not index all your critical content." "On the contrary, the Google Search Appliance was designed to search all critical content in the enterprise, including file shares, intranets, databases, and real-time business data – all from one simple search box," writes Nitin Mangtani, lead Google product manager, enterprise search on the official blog.

On security the paper says that the Google Search Appliance’s security features "are not sufficient enough for enterprise use." Mangtani says the Google Search Appliance has two levels of security. "First, the Google Search Appliance provides out-of-the-box support for multiple security access control systems" (such as SAML standards, SSO, NTLM, etc.).

"Secondly, the Google Search Appliance supports document-level security with all content sources, which ensures that end-users see only those documents in the results list to which they have access."

The white paper also points out that the search appliance capabilities are still being honed. Mangtani responds by writing," This is certainly true: We are constantly working to improve the appliance, to make sure it offers ever increasing relevancy out of the box. The fact is that we employ thousands of engineers focused on search relevancy and quality. In addition, we are the fastest innovator in the industry."

The blog post closes Mangtani writing that the list was by no means thorough and that "it’s important to clarify misinformation about enterprise search."
 

Glotzbach ripped Autonomy’s assessment of how Google determines relevancy, the content Google Enterprise can reach, language support, and stemming.

He saved his biggest broadside for Autonomy’s assessment of security in Google Enterprise:

In perhaps the most egregious statement in the whole document, the paper states that “Google provides open access to most documents — a potential hazard for businesses needing to keep proprietary information under wraps.” From the beginning, we have provided fast, accurate, and SECURE search within the enterprise. Our document-level security and access control capabilities ensure that users only see the content they are allowed to see, without requiring customers to deploy a new security system or undergo complex integrations.

Autonomy has a little history when it comes to taking shots at Google. Mike Lynch, Autonomy CEO, accused Google of dumbing-down user expectations of search back in 2005.

Making comments in a white paper that Google can rebut may not be the best use of Autonomy’s time, especially if Google could claim such remarks are factually incorrect.

I know those are two pretty stiff quotes with which to begin an article – sorry for that, but it’s often useful to see how companies view themselves.  As for how we view them, Autonomy’s relationship with Blinkx might be the best-known aspect of either business’s operations.

Yet those operations are quite big; the Times Online’s Rhys Blakely reports, “The news sent shares in Autonomy sharply higher, up 14 per cent at 829p, valuing the company at about £1.7 billion” (or about $3.4 billion).

It turns out that Zantaz is quite powerful, as well; although the corporation doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia entry, a press release reveals, “ZANTAZ customers include 9 of the top 10 global law firms, 11 of the Fortune 25 and 14 of the top 20 financial securities firms.”  Impressive.

That explains the lofty language used by both companies, then, and also the fairly large price for Zantaz.  And it seems that Autonomy is going to sit back and take a breather when this is all over.  “After the acquisition Autonomy will have about $75 million in cash left on its books, but it has said that it is not on the lookout for other acquisitions,” writes Blakely.

“Blinkx will then be combined with Autonomy’s consumer arm and will float on AIM [England’s Alternative Investment Market] in May, with analysts tipping a market value of anywhere between $150 million and $500 million,” reported the Times Online’s Joe Bolger.  From a business perspective, I’d say that’s not a bad start.

One analyst, Derek Brown of Seymour Pierce (an investment bank and stockbroker), seemed to agree.  “We expect it to be a highly sought after offering, given the explosion of unstructured video content on the web,” he told The Guardian.

(Brown’s prediction is probably less impressive – and yet all the more accurate – due to market movements that have already occurred; Bolger concluded his article with the update that “Autonomy shares were trading up 59.5p at 758p at 9am” due to the Blinkx news).

Blinkx is also looking pretty good from a user’s perspective.  Even as Google and YouTube face lawsuits on every front, Blinkx boasts of “partnerships with 200 leading content and media companies,” and the service has also “indexed over 7 million hours of video content and made it fully searchable using speech-to-text transcription and visual analysis.”

Expect big headlines, then, when the Blinkx IPO occurs.  And expect the phrase “Google killer” to be used a lot.

Cambridge-based search technology group Autonomy is “thinking beyond the spider”, with it’s newly developed tools that mimic the behavior of army ants.

“Nowadays, workers performing electronic searches want access to more of the data available to their companies – and better technologies for delivering it,” said Whit Andrews, vice president of research at Gartner, who originally promoted the idea of new ways to find information.

Search engines typically use “spiders”, which are used as a means of providing up-to-date data. Spiders are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine, which index downloaded pages to provide fast searches.

Also, spiders cannot index unlinked files, meaning that they will ignore all the miscellaneous files in a web server’s directory.

Autonomy’s new Intelligent Data Operating Layer, or IDOL, alerts are delivered whenever information sources change, providing the most accurate and recently updated data.

The new IDOL software mimics the behavior of ants by leaving a trail of information, allowing future searches to find the most recent and relevant results, said Autonomy’s Chief marketing officer Nicole Egen.

Egen also stated that, “We hope that our combination of spider and ant technology will bring together the efficiency of spiders with the ant’s capacity to bring back fresh data.”

While the idea of mimicking animal behavior to better search software seems innovative, DolphinSearch spent the past 15 years developing their technology.

Using the knowledge gained from research with dolphins and their uncanny ability to locate and recognize objects, “DolphinSearch set the standard for accuracy in electronic document discovery,” according to representatives of the site. The result was a collaborative effort among a group of legal, compliance, and audit professionals and experts.

“The patented technology uses artificial intelligence to search for context and meaning, much like a human,” said DolphinSearch CEO Andrew Kraftsow.

By mimicking the behavior and instincts of animals, the aforementioned companies have created innovative ways to further search information and technology.

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Autmn Davis is a staff writer for WebProNews covering ebusiness and technology.

The infrastructure software provider Autonomy will purchase Texas-based eTalk in a cash and stock deal worth about $70 million USD.

Autonomy also gains eTalk’s customer base of 1500+ existing contact centers. Another interesting aspect of the deal is hastening the deployment of searchable voice over IP telephony. Being able to easily search VOIP would be a boon to contact centers, but one must also get a sense of privacy further eroding. Autonomy lists the Department of Defense among its clients.

Autonomy describes the strength of its product as having advanced pattern matching techniques, enabling identification of patterns that naturally occur in text, based on the usage and frequency of words or terms that correspond to specific concepts. Uses for this technology have not been listed by the company. The conspiracy-minded certainly must be thinking of Echelon, though.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.